Tulips come in all shapes and sizes, but Jirí Praus has created a mechanical version like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s masterfully crafted as a gift for his wife, using bent wire to form its six petals and stem.
In order to make this present truly amazing, however, a servo-driven linkage system opens up the tulip when touched, exposing seven programmable LEDs in the center, along with 30 bright white SMD LEDs on the petals themselves.
Control for the freeform flower is accomplished via an Arduino Nano, hidden inside its wooden base. It’s a truly spectacular build, shown below illuminating the surrounding area with a brilliant light and shadow pattern.
As recently announced, Arduino Day 2019 will be celebrated on March 16th. If you plan on organizing your your own event, don’t forget to submit your proposal by March 3rd!
We have already received a hundred submissions from all across the globe and will continue to update our map regularly with new events — we are hoping to make it even bigger and better than last year!
As we prepare for the festivities, we have an important announcement for our community: the Arduino team will be holding this year’s official event at Milano Luiss Hub for Makers and Students in Milan, Italy.
The Official Arduino Day program will include an exhibition area with Arduino projects, a talk area, and an activity space for kids. The event is organized in collaboration with Manifattura Milano, a local initiative dedicated to craftsmanship, urban manufacturing and Industry 4.0 promoted by Milan Municipality – Labour Policies department.
We are currently seeking makers, speakers and activities for the Official Arduino Day in Milan. If you are able to physically attend and/or want to showcase your creations and their impact on your community, please fill out this form by March 3rd. Additionally, we are looking for volunteers to help out during the event, welcoming guests and assisting visitors. If you are interested in this opportunity, please feel free to complete this application. The call for local makers and volunteers will be powered by WeMake.
On Arduino Day, we will also support LoRa and the City, a hackathon organized by Codemotion and A2A, that will take place in Milan at Casa dell’Energia from March 16th to 17th. If you want to join the hackathon as an individual or a group, apply here — the winners of the two challenges (urban mobility and monitoring and energy and sustainability) will receive a €3,000 Amazon coupon.
Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we will be providing updates on the Official Arduino Day agenda. In the meantime, don’t forget to apply on the Arduino Day website and share your celebration on social media using the hashtag #ArduinoD19.
Come annunciato di recente, il 16 marzo celebreremo Arduino Day 2019; se volete festeggiare con noi e organizzare un evento community, avete tempo fino al 3 marzo per mandare la vostra proposta attraverso questo form!
Abbiamo già ricevuto un centinaio di candidature da tutto il mondo e continueremo ad aggiornare regolarmente la nostra mappa con nuovi eventi: speriamo di renderlo ancora più grande rispetto agli scorsi anni!
Mentre ci prepariamo per la festa, abbiamo un annuncio importante per la nostra community: Official Arduino Day, ovvero quello organizzato dal team Arduino, per il 2019 si terrà al Milano Luiss Hub for Makers and Students a Milano!
Il programma prevede un’area espositiva con progetti Arduino, un’area talk e uno spazio per con attività gratuite per i più piccoli. L’evento è organizzato in collaborazione con Manifattura Milano, l’iniziativa dedicata all’artigianato, alla produzione urbana e all’Industria 4.0 promossa dal Comune di Milano – Assessorato Politiche del Lavoro.
Call for maker and volunteers! Stiamo cercando maker e speaker per l’Official Arduino Day a Milano. Se puoi partecipare fisicamente all’evento e vuoi mostrare il tuo progetto o raccontare l’impatto che ha avuto sulla tua comunità, completa questo form entro il 3 marzo. Stiamo anche cercando volontari e volontarie che diano una mano durante l’evento, dando il benvenuto ai nostri ospiti, oppure aiutandoci con le attività. Se ti interessa questa opportunità, compila questo form. La call for maker and volunteers di Milano e dintorni è supportata da WeMake.
Durante Arduino Day, daremo supporto ad un’altra iniziativa a Milano, LoRa and the City, un hackathon che avrà luogo presso la Casa dell’Energia tra il 16 e il 17 Marzo. Se vuoi partecipare come singolo o con il tuo gruppo, clicca qui – in palio per le due sfide dell’hackathon (Urban Mobility and monitoring and Energy and Sustainability) ci saranno due buoni da 3000 € per Amazon.
Continua a seguirci, durante le prossime settimane condivideremo tutti i dettagli dell’agenda di Arduino Day. Nel frattempo, non dimenticarti di mandare la tua application attraverso il sito di Arduino Day e di condividere i festeggiamenti sui social con l’hashtag #ArduinoD19.
If you ever wondered about building your own multimeter, YouTuber Electronoobs shows us just how to do so with an Arduino Nano.
Aside from the Nano, he’s using a 128×64 OLED screen to display stats and battery level, and a 16-bit ADC for precise measurements. Power is provided by a small onboard LiPo battery, and he’s even included a charging module to help keep things topped off. Everything is housed inside a custom 3D-printed case.
The device doesn’t just measure voltage, resistance, and current, but is capable of reading capacitance and inductance as well—measurements that you wouldn’t necessarily expect on a commercial meter. If you’d like to create your own, the schematic and code are available on Electronoobs’ site.
Giving away buttons at Maker Faires or trade shows is a great way to promote your brand, but what if you want to dispense these trinkets in style? That was the idea behind this automated button dispenser mechanism from Jeremy S. Cook, which drops buttons one at a time, and uses a capacitive sensor to detect when someone presses a marked “activation circle” on its base.
When triggered, the Arduino Uno commands two servo motors in sequence to release the lower button, while holding the other stacked buttons in place. The button-in-motion then proceeds down a 3D-printed slide, shooting out into the receiver’s hands—or floor depending on one’s reflexes!
Be sure to check out the build process in the video below, and you can find code/print files on GitHub if you’d like to make your own!
Fluoride can be healthy in certain concentrations, but above a certain level it instead has the opposite effect, causing serious dental and bone diseases. While the cost and benefit of any substance use has to be carefully weighted, up until now, verification that water source isn’t contaminated—above just 2 ppm—has been the purview of well-equipped laboratories.
The prototype device used with SION-105 to detect fluoride anions in drinking water (Photo: Marie-Thé and Etienne Roux)
Researchers at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, however, have come up with a technique that can accurately determine fluoride concentrations using only a few drops of water. The key to this development is a new compound known as SION-105, which is normally luminescent, but darkens when it encounters fluoride. This means that instead of more expensive laboratory equipment, UV LEDs can be used with a photodiode to quantitatively measure the substance’s appearance, and thus the quantity of fluoride in drinking water.
A photograph of SION-105 suspended in solvents with (L) and without (R) fluoride ion contamination. (Photo: Mish Ebrahim)
From the images in EPFL’s write-up, the prototype test apparatus appears to utilize several commonly available components, including an Arduino Uno and small OLED display for user feedback.
Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), the device is named SION-105, is portable, considerably cheaper than current methods, and can be used on-site by virtually anyone.
The key to the device is the design of a novel material that the scientists synthesized (and after which the device is named). The material belongs to the family of “metal-organic frameworks” (MOFs), compounds made up of a metal ion (or a cluster of metal ions) connected to organic ligands, thus forming one-, two-, or three-dimensional structures. Because of their structural versatility, MOFs can be used in an ever-growing list of applications, e.g. separating petrochemicals, detoxing water, and getting hydrogen or even gold out of it.
SION-105 is luminescent by default, but darkens when it encounters fluoride ions. “Add a few droplets of water and by monitoring the color change of the MOF one can say whether it is safe to drink the water or not,” explains Mish Ebrahim, the paper’s first author. “This can now be done on-site, without any chemical expertise.”
After purchasing a new television, maker Andreas Spiess’ remote no longer worked seamlessly with the controller his family had been using. While a universal remote could have solved the problem, in order to keep things simple to use, he instead came up with an infrared “babel fish” signal translator—named after the language translation animal Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s.
The device receives infrared signals from the original remote, then uses an Arduino Nano to pass the properly translated pulses on to his TV and receiver. A 3W IR diode transmits these new signals with the help of an N-channel MOSFET, giving it enough power to control each component, even without the proper line-of-sight orientation.
It’s a hack that could be useful in many situations, and Speiss goes over how it was made, along with design requirements in the video below.
If you’d like to visualize your music, VU meters make an excellent tool. While they are generally built into audio equipment, maker James Bruton had the idea to construct his own using lasers. His setup features an MSGEQ7 module to separate sound frequencies, sending data on seven different ranges to an ArduinoMega board.
The Arduino then uses this information to selectively lower seven shutters via servos. When lowered, these shutters hide part of the lines formed by lasers and a spinning mirror assembly to indicate each sound frequency’s intensity.
The resulting machine not only effectively projects a visual of the music playing on a nearby wall, but also looks like some sort of mythical beast or contraption, progressively waving its appendages while emitting eerie green light!
Although this kind of project can be fun, be sure to wear the proper safety equipment when dealing with powerful lasers!
In our pursuit to democratize Internet of Things development, today we are excited to announce the Arduino IoT Cloud!
The Arduino IoT Cloud is an easy-to-use platform that makes it very simple for anyone to develop and manage their IoT applications, then deploy them to a large number of users. It allows users to create applications that solve real-life problems, and hopefully, improve their lives.
With the launch of the Arduino IoT Cloud, Arduino now provides its one million users a complete end-to-end approach to IoT that includes hardware, firmware, cloud services, and knowledge. After six months of private beta testing, I am very pleased to release the public beta of the Arduino IoT Cloud with automatic dashboard generation, Webhooks support, and full TLS secure transport.
— Luca Cipriani, Arduino CIO
Convenience and flexibility are key considerations for the Arduino IoT Cloud. Arduino boards usually require you to program them by entering code by way of a sketch — now the Arduino IoT Cloud can do this for you. It will quickly and automatically generate a sketch when setting up a new thing, thus enabling a developer to go from unboxing their board to a working device within five minutes. The Arduino IoT Cloud also provides other methods of interaction, including HTTP REST API, MQTT, Command-Line Tools, Javascript, and Websockets.
Going from an idea to a fully-functional IoT device has been a tedious process even for the most advanced engineers and developers… until now. Arduino now offers a complete platform with the MKR family providing a streamlined way to create local IoT nodes and edge devices using a range of connectivity options and compatibility with third-party hardware, gateway, and cloud systems. Whilst the Arduino IoT Cloud lets users manage, configure and connect not only Arduino hardware but the vast majority of Linux-based devices — truly democratizing IoT development. — Massimo Banzi, Arduino CTO and Co-Founder
Görkem Bozkurt has a bit of a problem. When he gets going with a build, sometimes safety glasses are forgotten in the excitement of making something new. While understandable, this doesn’t make things any less dangerous, so he came up with a novel idea to put on his safety specs on automatically.
His wearable creation attaches an Arduino Nano and a MAX4466 electret mic amplifier to the top of a previously normal hat, along with a small servo connected to a pair of lens below the bill. If a loud sound is heard, the goggles are lowered by the servo in response. They’re then retracted when the noise, and hopefully the danger, is gone.
While the system is still very much a work-in-progress, it’s an entertaining concept that Bozkurt hopes to develop further.
According to musician/maker Ruben Dax, “Few things make him happier than being able to create things that create things.” As seen in the video below, what he’s created is a very strange cylindrical instrument with an array of buttons and what appears to be an auxiliary loop controller.
What he creates with it is music that starts off as simple “plink-plonk” sounds, but builds up into something of an orchestral arrangement.
The DIY device utilizes an Arduino Mega for control, with a bunch of pushbuttons and a dual-axis joystick for inputs. Button info is then sent to his computer over Bluetooth, which takes care of actual MIDI generation.
As cool as this is, a new gadget is in the works, which uses a Leonardo and other hardware for plug-and-play functionality. Whether this will interfere with the instrument’s unique rotating action remains to be seen!
